Multivariate extremality measure

Abstract

We propose a new multivariate order based on a concept that we will call extremality". Given a unit vector, the extremality allows to measure the "farness" of a point with respect to a data cloud or to a distribution in the vector direction. We establish the most relevant properties of this measure and provide the theoretical basis for its nonparametric estimation. We include two applications in Finance: a multivariate Value at Risk (VaR) with level sets constructed through extremality and a portfolio selection strategy based on the order induced by extremality.